Spiritual and Ecological Sucession

Lee Berman · 13 Jan 2011, 14:50 · from 2011-January.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2011 09:50:15 -0500
Subject: (urth) Spiritual and Ecological Sucession
Message-ID: <SNT123-W52F0AE461EAC68AD687FE1CFF00 at phx.gbl>

>Jerry Friedman: One of the two main hints, as I see it, is indeed Merryn.

Well, when Severian was pre-pubescent they did meet in the Witches Tower. She
answers the door and guides him to the Cumaean. But it seems implied in CotC that
the Stone Town rooftop is the second time they meet. Her hanging out in the Matatchin
Tower really doesn't sound right.

>Hide describes Severian as still growing and younger than Hide, who Silkhorn says is sixteen.

I guess there could be different year lengths between Blue and Urth. But, yeah, I get the 
impression that when Severian meets Triskele he is already close to if not fully grown.

>A minor point is that Hide says the journeymen's hoods are trimmed with red, and 
>in all the mentions of the torturers' clothes in TBotnS, we never hear anything about that.

I thought that could be a meta-reference to the cover art. The classic SotT cover has some reddish
pattern trimming the collar and inside of the cloak (though not the hood).

>this suggests an explanation for why Silkhorn (as the ghost of Malrubius) isn't in TBotNS.

I've heard of the idea before (Silkhorn as ghost of Malrubius). But doesn't that mean Silkhorn
would have to resemble, i.e. BE Malrubius? Silk slices animals but could he flay skin, gouge
eyes and otherwise torture human beings?

I agree there are enough inconsistencies to warrant the suggestion that this is not our version
of Severian. I still think some of the motivation for the scenario is to present a Wolfean 
solution to the puzzle of who is Severian's sister: Merryn for those who prefer simpler, more
direct answers; Jolenta (who plays Jahi= Jahlee) for those who prefer convoluted and indirect
answers.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net